Briefly:Philip Seymour Hoffman is about to make his second feature as a director, and he has lined up Jake Gyllenhaal and Amy Adams to star. The film is Ezekiel Moss, a supernatural thriller and a “Depression-era ghost story.” The film has been coming together slowly, after first being announced in fall 2012. When we reported on it then, Producer Cathy Schulman of Mandalay Pictures called the Keith Bunin script, which had been on the 2011 Black List, a “captivating and gothic exploration of faith and the supernatural.”

The script centers on “a young, imaginative boy living in a small town who befriends a mysterious drifter who may have the ability to communicate with the dead.” Gyllenhaal will play the drifter, while Adams will play the boy’s mother, a widow. Even with the cast starting to come together, there’s no word on when the film will shoot. [The Wrap]